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EXCLUSIVE: On Mother’s Day, Talarico released a comprehensive policy strategy to support pregnant and postpartum women, as Black women are three times more likely to die from childbirth-related causes.
James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, unveiled on Sunday a plan to tackle maternal mortality, theGrio reports exclusively, emphasizing the outsized crisis it is having on Black women.
On Mother’s Day, Talarico released a comprehensive policy strategy to support pregnant and postpartum women, including nationwide paid maternity leave legislation, improved data collection, and investment in maternal health research.
“I’m proud to announce our comprehensive plan to tackle the maternal mortality crisis — an issue that has disproportionately impacted Black women in Texas and across the country for far too long,” said Talarico, a Texas State Representative, who is hoping to flip the U.S. Senate seat in Texas for Democrats for the first time in more than 30 years.
The maternal mortality rate in the United States is the highest among wealthy nations, with Black women being three times more likely to die from childbirth or postpartum complications. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), while the maternal mortality rate has decreased for white, Hispanic, and Asian women in recent years, it has increased for Black women.
The Black maternal health crisis has gained increased attention in recent years as a result of high-profile cases of Black women who have died during or after childbirth in states where reproductive access is limited as a result of anti-abortion laws following the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court case, Dobbs v. Jackson, which reversed 50 years of reproductive health access under Roe v. Wade.
To address the maternal health crisis and the clear disparities impacting Black women, Talarico proposes guaranteeing all new mothers time off through nationwide paid maternity legislation. His plan would also improve data collection, provider training, and investment in maternal health research, ensuring that maternal mortality review committees (MMRCs) in every state can better understand the maternal mortality crisis. The Democrat says he also wants doctors to have the necessary skills to treat the most affected patients, and for policymakers to make decisions that properly represent Black and brown communities.
Talarico’s plan is supported by Texas State Rep. Toni Rose, who successfully passed bipartisan legislation, HB12, that extended Medicaid and CHIP postpartum coverage.
“The maternal mortality crisis in Texas and across our nation is unacceptable, and Black women are bearing the heaviest burden,” said Rose. “I fought to pass House Bill 12 to expand care for new mothers because no woman should die bringing life into the world.”
She said of Talarico: “Representative Talarico understands what’s at stake, and his plan shows he’s ready to take this fight to Washington. We need a champion in the U.S. Senate, and I’m proud to stand with him.”
Talarico, who said he was “honored” to follow in Rose’s footsteps, said he plans to “build on her trailblazing work in the U.S. Senate,” if elected on Nov. 3.
The Democratic Senate nominee’s plan also includes extending Medicare to Americans of all ages and restoring tax credits under the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The plan would mandate that states extend Medicaid coverage for pregnant and postpartum women up to 12 months, and expand federal grant programs to educate pregnant and postpartum women about healthcare options and connect them to resources.
The comprehensive maternal mortality proposal also seeks to end maternal care deserts by requiring insurance coverage for doula and midwife services, expanding access to telemedicine, and funding workforce development programs that recruit and retain maternal care providers, including those from underserved communities.
Talarico wants to also extend eligibility for the WIC program and expand the Healthy Start Program to support families with home visits, care coordination, parenting education, and other services before, during, and after pregnancy.
Talarico’s emphasis on addressing the Black maternal health crisis comes as he is working to gain the support of more Black voters in Texas, which has the highest number of Black Americans of any state in the country. High turnout among Black voters is critical for a Democrat to win in Texas, a state that has long been Republican-dominated.
In the March primary election, Talarico defeated U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a popular Democrat who had strong support from Black voters. Now, Talarico is hoping to bring those voters into his coalition of supporters.
In a statement to theGrio, Talarico said, “In the Texas Legislature, I led the fight against racist redistricting maps and private school voucher scams rooted in school segregation. I secured major criminal justice reforms, banned reality TV policing, and passed legislation to lower the cost of childcare, housing, and prescription drugs.”
However, the Texas lawmaker said, “There’s so much more work to do,” adding, “For far too long, Black communities have been overlooked, undervalued, and taken for granted by both parties in this broken, corrupt political system. That’s why we’re centering issues like maternal health in this campaign.”

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May 10, 2026
The actress, author, Real Housewives star, and former fashion model reflects on the moments that shaped her in an intimate new Audible Original
Garcelle Beauvais has spent decades in the public eye: on runways, on sets, on red carpets, and on Real Housewives—one of the most-watched reality franchises in television history. Now she’s spilling the tea about her journey and how she learned to stand firm, find her power in authenticity, and walk away on her own terms.
Her latest work, written and narrated by Beauvais, allows listeners unprecedented intimacy as she shares behind-the-scenes moments, personal revelations, and hard-won wisdom about relationships, identity, and what it means to refuse to shrink yourself for anyone. Protecting My Peace…At ALL Costs arrived exclusively on Audible this week.
“This is a story about knowing when your spirit says no more, and having the courage to honor that truth,” said Beauvais in a statement. “Learning to protect my peace, set boundaries without apology, and finally walk in the power that I have always carried isn’t selfish. It’s survival.”
“I wanted to share what I’ve learned about walking into rooms as my full self and refusing to leave any part of who I am at the door,” she continued. “Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is simply choose you.”
From growing up in Haiti to making it in Hollywood, raising three boys, navigating two failed marriages, and her groundbreaking run on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Beauvais reflects on the experiences that shaped her life and shares the lessons they taught her in intuition, discernment, love, and faith.
In just-released clips from the audio book, she opens up about how news of her husband’s infidelity affected her career when it leaked to the press:
“My whole world exploded… The fallout didn’t stay inside my house. It followed me into audition rooms, on sets, through industry events where everyone knew my name—and my business.”
She also takes us behind the scenes of how Real Housewives of Beverly Hills affected her mental health, leading to her now infamous reunion show walk-off:
“When I realized I was crying more than I was excited to go to work, I knew something had to give. The executives were worried about me. They had never seen me that broken up. They recommended I talk to the show’s therapist. And he said something that stopped me cold, ‘It sounds like the negative is catching up to the positive.’”
RELATED CONTENT: Garcelle Beauvais Becomes 1st Black Cast Member of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

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Roth channeled Renaissance painter Irene di Spilimbergo in his performance during the Biennale preview week
Courtesy the artist and Lucien Pagès
There is a plethora of events around the Venice Biennale but some stand out more than others. One talking point was a performance held 7 May at Palazzo dei Fiori, a Renaissance Venetian palazzo, devised by Jordan Roth, the US multi-disciplinary artist who wowed crowds earlier this week at the Met Gala in New York with a “living sculpture” look. Presented in collaboration with Performance Space New York’s Visionaries Circle patrons group, the work staged in Venice was attended by art world luminaries such as Scott Rothkopf, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the London-based dealer Kristin Hjellegjerde. Guests were unsure what to expect as they filed into the grandest of halls. But Roth left the onlookers speechless and silent as he tore apart vinyl prints of the 16th-century polymath Irene di Spilimbergo affixed to a glass pane in a custom gilt frame, elegantly repositioning and refashioning the fragments into compelling collages accompanied by classical music. “Bound within the frame, Roth and the paintings are fused together, muse and artist becoming one,” says a pithy project statement.
A chocolate gladiator features in Valletta-based artist Charlie Cauchi’s film and accompanying installation in the Arsenale
Derrick Adams’ piece features “beams of gold signifying the brilliance and reach” of the curator’s influence
The new mother may have upstaged some of the artwork on show
The artist’s contribution to In Minor Keys includes a decked out truck driven from London to Venice

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Photo by Lianhao Qu on Unsplash
This year’s May auctions in New York are shaping up to be a major moment for the art trade, with works cumulatively estimated at to bring between $1.8bn and $2.6bn coming up for sale at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips and Bonhams. The auction houses will be looking to build on the momentum of last November’s sales, whose results were widely seen as signs of recovery after a three-year slump—and the optimism in the field is palpable.
At Sotheby’s alone, the sales’ low pre-sale estimate of $690.4m is 70% higher than the total hammer figure from the May 2025 season, and on the high end, the auction house could bring in as much as $942.5m. And Christie’s is aiming even higher, with an expected total between $1b and $1.5b.
The two rival houses split two of the most-anticipated estates of the season, from two legendary dealers, with Christie’s landing the collection of Marian Goodman and Sotheby’s offering Robert Mnuchin’s holdings.
Gerhard Richter, Kerze (Candle), 1982 (est $35m-$50m) Courtesy Christie’s Images Ltd.
The expected top lot from Goodman’s collection, hitting the auction block at Rockefeller Center on 20 May, is Gerhard Richter’s Kerze (Candle), which is part of his unexpected turn from celebrated abstractions to still-life painting in the 1980s. The dealer purchased the 1982 painting before she began representing Richter in 1985 and found it so inspirational she sent him a cold letter suggesting they work together—a partnership that would go on to last 40 years. Christie’s has given the canvas an estimate of $35m to $50m.
Sotheby’s has placed a $130m total estimate on its Mnuchin lots, which are the subject of a dedicated evening sale at the Breuer Building on 14 May. The group is led by a $70m to $100m Mark Rothko painting titled Brown and Blacks in Reds (1957). Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc acquired it the year Rothko painted it and it is believed to have shaped the direction of Rothko’s famed Seagram Mural commission for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant the following year.
Mark Rothko, Brown and Blacks in Reds, 1957 (est $70m-$100m) Courtesy Sotheby’s
“So many of the best American collectors bought all their works from or with the advice of Bob Mnuchin,” Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art marquee sales in New York, tells The Art Newspaper. “And the ultimate endorsement is that these are the works he held back.”
Another important estate on offer at Sotheby’s this month is that of the Italian Surrealist Enrico Donati and his wife, Adele Donati. Among the 45 lots from his holdings is Pablo Picasso’s 1909 painting Arlequin (Buste), which will be included in the multiple-owner evening sale of Modern art on 19 May. It is a rare chance to snap up one of his major Cubist works, and could fetch up to $40m (though when it came to market 18 years ago, it failed to sell).
Constantin Brâncuși, Danaïde, around 1913 (est on request, in the region of $100m) Courtesy Christie’s Images, Ltd.
Christie’s is bringing to auction additional holdings from the late Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse, who died back in 2017. The 16 lots from his collection will be featured in a dedicated sale on 18 May immediately preceding the firm’s multi-owner evening auction of 20th-century art. The group is estimated to collectively bring in as much as $450m and is led by a pair of $100m works: the drip painting Number 7A (1948) by Jackson Pollock, and Danaïde (around 1913), a bronze and gold leaf sculpture of a stylised head by Constantin Brancusi. (When Newhouse bought it, in 2002, it set a world record for a sculpture at auction of $18.1m.)
In its evening sale of 20th-century art on 18 May, Christie’s will also offer a trio of works that belonged to the late arts patron Agnes Gund, by Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Joseph Cornell, which could together bring in $123m. And from the collection of the late philanthropist Marilyn Arison, an impressive selection of Impressionist works will likely be led by Edouard Manet’s floral still life Pivoines dans une Bouteille (1864). It is the last in a series of six by the artist in private hands, and it is estimated at $7m to $10m.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), 1983 (est in excess of $45m) Courtesy Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s, meanwhile, is expecting major results from works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Willem de Kooning during it’s the Now & Contemporary evening sale on 14 May. Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) is expected to bring $45m and and De Kooning’s Untitled III is estimated at $25m to $35m. There is also the potential for a new record for a Vincent van Gogh work on paper, when the auction house offers an impressively large and chromatic watercolour, La Moisson en Provence (1888), estimated at $25m to $35m, during its evening sale of Modern art on 19 May. (A work from the same series achieved $35.8m, the current auction record for his works on paper, at Christie’s in 2021.)
And from the collection of the German Swiss socialite and playboy Gunter Sachs, Sotheby’s will offer Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of Sachs’s wife, the titular Brigitte Bardot. Based on a Richard Avedon photograph, it is estimated at $14m to $18m. (A different version of this work sold in a live single-lot auction conducted by Loïc Gouzer’s Fair Warning platform for $16.7m last November.)
Andy Warhol, 4 Colored Marilyns (Reversal Series), 1979-86 (est $4m-$6m) Courtesy Phillips
Collectors will also get a chance to bring home some of Warhol’s women at Phillips on 19 May, where the 1964 silkscreen Sixteen Jackies leads the evening sale with a $15m to $20m estimate. And Jacqueline Kennedy is joined there by Warhol’s 4 Colored Marilyns (Reversal Series), depicting Marilyn Monroe in blue and green on a black background. The work, which has never come to auction before, could make $4m to $6m.
Other highlights at Phillips include a rich collection of Danish art amassed by the late US ambassador John L. Loeb Jr, and a singular work on canvas by Lee Bontecou that has not been on public view in two decades. The untitled piece, depicting a fragmented wave-like form, could bring in between $1.2m and $1.8m.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1985-2001 (est $1.2m-$1.8m) Courtesy Phillips
“While she is rightly celebrated for her revolutionary steel relief sculptures, this expansive work occupies a category entirely its own. There is nothing else quite like it in her entire body of work,” Robert Manley, Phillips’s chairman of Modern and contemporary art, said in a statement, calling it “a rare opportunity for our collecting community to encounter Bontecou at her most ambitious and visionary”.
And as prices for longer-overlooked mid-century women abstract artists continue to tick up, it is worth keeping an eye on the result at Phillips for Fortune, a colourful 1960 work by the second-generation New York School painter Pat Passlof. The estimate is between $300,000 and $500,000, but her work has already achieved a new secondary-market record this year, with a $537,600 result (including fees) at Sotheby’s New York in February. In total, Phillips is expecting to bring in between $108.7m and $157m from its New York sales this month.
Yoshitomo Nara, …Words Mean Nothing at All, 2012 (est $4m-$6m) Courtesy Bonhams
Rounding out the May auctions is Bonhams, which is expecting a comparatively modest $30m in sales as it inaugurates its new flagship at 111 West 57th Street. The predicted top lot of its 20 May evening sale is a monumental Yoshitomo Nara painting, …Words Mean Nothing at All (2012), with an estimate of $4m to $6m.
The auction house is also bringing 21 mostly never-before-seen Pierre-Auguste Renoir works to the block. The great French Impressionist personally gifted the works to his longtime model and family nanny Gabrielle Renard, and they have remained in her family ever since. The most anticipated painting of the group, the 1887 floral still life titled Fleurs, is estimated at $500,000 to $700,000.
The most valuable lot of the week is a record-breaking Magritte with a third-party guarantee, but the most talked-about is a conceptual still life by Maurizio Cattelan
Estimates are up by more than 40% over last year’s November sales, driven in large part by Sotheby’s consignments
Overall sales were down by around 30% but beyond the disappointing headline figures, women and minority artists shone
Demand for ultra contemporary works may have eased but there is little sign of a sales slump, say the New York firms

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The hantavirus, while rare, can spread through contact with infected rodents or their droppings. As cases rise, understanding its transmission is crucial.
How contagious is hantavirus? Concerns are growing after the World Health Organization (WHO) announced on May 4 that it was monitoring a cluster of severe respiratory illnesses aboard a cruise ship called the MV Hondus. As of May 7, there were eight reported cases: five people have been confirmed to have hantavirus, and three others are suspected, according to the WHO. The outbreak has resulted in three deaths and one critically ill patient.
According to the WHO, the strain identified on the ship is believed to be the Andes virus, the only known type of hantavirus capable of spreading from person to person. It’s commonly found in South America, where the cruise ship departed, and can cause severe illness.
According to the WHO’s notice, the vessel departed Ushuaia, Argentina, on April 1 and traveled across the South Atlantic, making multiple stops in remote and ecologically diverse regions, including mainland Antarctica, South Georgia, Nightingale Island, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena, and Ascension Island. It remains unclear whether passengers had contact with local wildlife during the voyage or prior to embarkation in Ushuaia.
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Hantavirus is typically transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents, especially exposure to their urine, droppings, or saliva. In rare cases, infection can also occur through rodent bites or scratches, according to the CDC. Most hantavirus strains are not contagious between people, making the overall risk of human-to-human spread very low. However, the Andes virus is an exception, as limited person-to-person transmission has been documented among people in close contact with infected patients. Transmission between people has been associated with close, prolonged contact, particularly among family members, intimate partners, or healthcare providers. The pygmy rice rat primarily carries the Andes virus and spreads from person to person through close contact with an infected individual, including exposure to respiratory droplets produced by coughing, sneezing, or talking, as well as through the exchange of saliva, NBC News noted.
Hantaviruses can cause two serious illnesses: Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS), which affects the lungs, and Hemorrhagic Fever with Renal Syndrome (HFRS), which primarily impacts the kidneys. HPS, the strain more commonly found in the United States, often begins with fever, fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, nausea, and abdominal pain before rapidly progressing to coughing, shortness of breath, and fluid buildup in the lungs. The CDC estimates that about 38% of patients who develop respiratory symptoms from HPS die from the disease.
HFRS, which is more common in Europe and Asia, causes symptoms such as severe headaches, fever, back pain, blurred vision, low blood pressure, internal bleeding, and, in severe cases, kidney failure. While some strains have fatality rates below 1%, others can kill up to 15% of infected patients.
Currently, there is no licensed specific antiviral treatment or vaccine for hantavirus infection, according to the WHO. The agency considers the global public health risk from the cruise ship outbreak to be low but says investigations remain ongoing. Health officials continue to stress that the best way to prevent hantavirus infection is by avoiding contact with rodents and areas contaminated by rodent waste. Sealing homes, setting traps, and safely cleaning rodent-infested spaces are among the most effective prevention measures.
SEE MORE:
RFK Jr. Goes Full ‘All Lives Matter’ When Pressed By Rep. Summer Lee About Eliminating Black Maternal Health Research
Mpox Questions Answered Amid Latest Global Health Emergency
How Contagious Is The Hantavirus? was originally published on newsone.com

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Just when it seemed like Latto was entering the prime of her career, the Atlanta rapper dropped a bombshell that has social media reacting. On Friday, the “Sunday Service” artist took to X to announce that her Big Mama album will serve as her final release.
“5/29 My retirement album Thank you for everything,” she wrote, catching her millions of fans and followers completely off guard.
At only 28 years old, the news feels premature to many, especially considering the massive momentum she’s built over the last few years. If she follows through, Big Mama will mark the end of a four-album run that helped define modern Southern female rap.
The announcement is especially shocking given Latto’s recent chart dominance. According to Billboard, her last project, Sugar Honey Iced Tea, debuted at No. 15 on the Billboard 200 in 2024 and spawned hits like “Brokey” and “Sunday Service.”
With Latto’s album set to feature 17 tracks, the project is being positioned as a farewell. Since Latto is currently pregnant and expecting her first child, presumably with 21 Savage, many insiders believe her decision to step away is rooted in a desire to focus entirely on motherhood.

For an artist who has been in the spotlight since she was a teenager on The Rap Game, the rapstress may be ready for the soft life.
The reaction on social media was immediate and mixed. While some fans sent their love and congratulations on the motherhood journey, others weren’t buying it.

Many users brought up the trend of rappers announcing their retirement, then returning to the mic years later. It’s a fair point, considering rap history is littered with retirement announcements from icons like Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj that didn’t stick.
Even stars like Lizzo were shocked to hear the news of the possible retirement. In a short video, singing along to Latto’s “Big Mama,” the caption read, “Latto, you betta not retire.”

If this truly is the end, Latto is going out on her own terms.
Bye, Bye Big Mama? Latto Announces Retirement & Final Album Release—‘Thank You For Everything’ was originally published on bossip.com

COMMENTARY: 5 Reasons Why Obama Will Beat Romney
The 30 Most Beautiful Black Women In Hollywood
Rest In Power: Notable Black Folks Who We’ve Lost In 2026
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According to the new agreement, players are receiving new family-planning benefits that require fewer years of service and now extend to their partners and spouses.
On Mother’s Day this Sunday, WNBA players have something new to celebrate this year. The WNBA is providing new family-friendly benefits under its new collective bargaining agreement that give more support and protection for players who want to expand or start a family. 
According to the new agreement, players are receiving new family-planning benefits that require fewer years of service and now extend to their partners and spouses. Pregnant players can veto any attempts a team might make to trade them. The new CBA also creates a “pregnancy and childbirth salary cap exception” whereby pregnant players will receive their full salaries without it counting toward the team’s salary cap. The provision thereby removes the financial incentive to trade that positioned pregnant players as a financial liability under the old agreement. 
This marks a seismic change from the last CBA, which only granted family planning benefits to players with eight or more years of service. In 2018, the Phoenix Mercury opened up a childcare facility for players. All teams will now be required to provide family and nursing rooms. 
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The old agreement forbade players from entering into a contract while knowingly pregnant without prior written disclosure to the team. In effect, the league viewed pregnancy through the same lens as an injury, illness, or other physical condition that might impede a player’s ability to perform or fulfill their contractual obligations. This gave players little to no incentive to divulge a pregnancy early to facilitate necessary advanced planning for themselves or their teams. 
Many have been calling the revisions the Hamby Clause, named after WNBA All-Star player Dearica Hamby. Hamby made headlines in 2024 when she filed a lawsuit against the WNBA and her former team, the Las Vegas Aces. 
According to the lawsuit, Hamby alleged that she was traded to the LA Sparks after Las Vegas Aces’ coach Becky Hammon and the team’s front office learned she was pregnant in 2022. Hamby claimed that her pregnancy motivated the team to trade her. In May of 2025, a U.S. District Court judge dismissed all claims against the WNBA while allowing Hamby’s lawsuit against the Las Vegas Aces to move forward.
While Hamby and the Aces ultimately opted to drop the lawsuit in December of 2025, the issues it raised about how WNBA teams handle trades when a player is pregnant informed changes to the WNBA’s recently signed collective bargaining agreement. Now that a player can veto a trade while they are pregnant, it ensures they won’t have to juggle moving to a new city and uprooting their lives while navigating a pregnancy. 
For women in the WNBA seeking to become pregnant, there is no perfect time to have a baby. Part of that conversation is centered on the realities of being a professional athlete, and the other comes down to biology. There is significant overlap between a woman athlete’s peak competitive years and their prime childbearing window. 
Many WNBA players face the prospect of navigating career-defining seasons at a time when starting a family is most biologically viable, as Hamby did, when she became pregnant ahead of a season in which the Las Vegas Aces were seeking to win back-to-back championships.
The W has emerged as a leader in athlete family policy, even when compared to its counterpart, the men’s NBA league. The MNBA has no formal, guaranteed parental leave policy for its players, unlike the WNBA. It is understood that each birth of a child is handled on a case-by-case basis, with players typically missing up to a few games to welcome their new bundles of joy. They are often listed on the game roster as being out for personal reasons. 
For women WNBA players, the calculation and participation in starting or extending a family looks very different. What a man in the MNBA experiences as a brief interruption is, for a pregnant WNBA player, a full reorganization and then reorientation of her body, her career, and her season. They need more than a few games to get back out on the court. Traveling with the team requires medical considerations. Doctors have to be coordinated across cities, prenatal appointments have to fit around road trips, and a baby’s arrival around a calendar that doesn’t pause for her. Pregnancy often unfolds across an entire season, postpartum recovery stretches into the next one, and the return to competitive form requires strenuous work. 
Even after giving birth, the labor only redistributes; it does not lessen. Mothers, whether they carried the pregnancy themselves or became parents through a partner who did, still tend to absorb the bulk of caregiving work in ways their male counterparts rarely do. They are the ones tracking feeding schedules, coordinating pediatrician appointments, managing the household logistics that make travel possible, and holding the weighty cognitive load of supporting a small human’s daily existence. 
For non-birthing parents like Las Vegas Aces’ star point guard Chelsea Gray or Connecticut Sun star Brittney Griner, who have both welcomed children with their respective wives, the caregiving expectations are no less real, even when the body that gave birth to the child belongs to someone else. And while the new CBA has lifted salaries to a place where parenthood is more financially viable, most WNBA players still cannot afford the full-time nannies, private chefs, and round-the-clock household staff that allow NBA fathers to outsource many of the daily logistics that accompany raising a child. The point is that motherhood, however a WNBA player arrives at it, is structured around her in ways that fatherhood rarely is around the men in the league next door.
Plenty of players have successfully juggled motherhood and a career in the WNBA. In fact, there’s a long history of WNBA players who have had children during their careers and returned to the sport after giving birth. Candace Parker gave birth to her first child the season after her rookie year and went on to win multiple championships. Cheyenne Parker-Tyus was pregnant when she was acquired by the Las Vegas Aces in the offseason. She gave birth to her second child, Yoshua, on July 1, 2025, and returned to the Aces lineup on Sept. 9, 2025, just in time for the team’s successful championship run. 
For their part, WNBA teams face the harsh reality that a player who is pregnant may need to stop playing well before the due date. Each player needs a recommended cut-off date for play, so as not to jeopardize the life of the baby they are carrying. This is a decision not made lightly, especially considering the W is a league that has traditionally allowed aggressive, physical play during games. 
Now, a player no longer has to negotiate motherhood as a personal favor, hoping her coach and general manager have empathy, or trust that their goodwill will hold across roster changes. The benefits are now contractual and by definition will survive coaching changes, ownership shifts, league turnover, and trades. The shift from depending on individual decency to enforceable written protections will be tangible. Instead of a player wondering if she can have a family, her focus can be on planning for one. 
For current players, the new protections and benefits allow a career and a family to coexist without one quietly canceling out the other. And, this Mother’s Day, that is a gift for all the women who have given the league their athletic labor who no longer need to choose between the children they want and the careers they are building. It is also a promise to future generations of players that what their predecessors fought for individually will now be theirs automatically.  
SEE ALSO:
Everything You Need To Know About The 2026 WNBA Season

WNBA: Free Raven Johnson, Or At Least Protect Her
The WNBA’s New Collective Bargaining Agreement Is Changing The Math On Motherhood For Players was originally published on newsone.com

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Amidst the anticipation of making history again, meet Dystany Spurlock, whose achievements have the sports world buzzing!
Dystany Spurlock is not just pulling up to NASCAR — she is arriving there after years of proving she belongs in every space people tried to tell her wasn’t built for her. The Richmond, Virginia native is set to become the first Black woman to compete in one of NASCAR’s top three national series when she makes her NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series debut on May 8, 2026, at Watkins Glen International. For a sport that has long struggled with representation, especially when it comes to Black women behind the wheel, Spurlock’s moment is bigger than one race. It’s a barrier-breaking chapter that has been years in the making.
Before stock cars became the headline, Spurlock was already making noise on two wheels. She started racing motorcycles as a teenager and built a name for herself in motorcycle drag racing, eventually competing in NHRA Pro Stock Motorcycle. According to EURweb, she also made history as the first woman to win the DME Racing Real Street class in the XDA Series and, in 2024, set a Real Street Bike world record with a 7.32 ET at 178 mph. So when folks talk about her making history now, it’s important to understand this is not some random overnight story. Spurlock has been fast, fearless and focused for a long time.
Her path to NASCAR also feels personal because racing has been part of her life since childhood. Dystany Spurlock grew up near Richmond Raceway, and she has credited her grandfather’s love of NASCAR with helping spark her own interest in the sport. She told ARCA that her first vehicle after getting her license had two wheels instead of four, and that her family supported her passion early on, including her mother helping her get a motorcycle. That love of speed eventually turned into something bigger: a mission to move from motorcycle racing into stock cars, even after several opportunities fell through over the years.
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Spurlock’s road has never been limited to one lane. She played cornerback and safety on boys’ football teams in middle school and high school, worked as a flight attendant, drove a tractor-trailer with a CDL, raced Formula 4 through Skip Barber, and built a career as a model, actress, and entrepreneur. In other words, she has been the type to step into spaces where people don’t expect her and make them adjust. That same energy followed her into motorsports, where she has had to fight for opportunities in a world that is still overwhelmingly male and not exactly overflowing with Black women racers.
The 2026 season has been Spurlock’s real stock-car breakthrough. In March, she became the first Black woman to race on the ARCA Menards Series platform when she competed at Hickory Motor Speedway, finishing seventh in her ARCA East debut. She followed that with a 12th-place finish at Rockingham, then made more history at Kansas Speedway by becoming the first Black woman to compete in a national ARCA Menards Series event and finishing 10th. Her official site highlighted that Kansas finished in the top 10 in her national ARCA debut, which only made the buzz around her NASCAR Truck Series opportunity even louder.
That is why her May 8 double duty at Watkins Glen matters so much. Spurlock is scheduled to race in both the ARCA Menards Series and the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series on the same day, with her Truck Series debut marking a first for Black women in NASCAR’s national series history. She will be racing with MBM Motorsports/Garage 66, with Foxxtecca backing her and helping tell her story through a docuseries focused on her journey from Pro Stock Motorcycle racing to NASCAR. She framed this moment as about access, representation, and preparation for the meeting.
For Spurlock, the history is huge, but the bigger picture is what it can unlock for whoever is watching next. NASCAR has had Black stars like Bubba Wallace and Rajah Caruth helping push the sport forward, and women like Brehanna Daniels have broken ground on pit crews, but Spurlock is now carrying that representation onto the track in a national series. That’s important because little black girls deserve to see someone who looks like them in a fire suit, in the driver’s seat, and chasing the same checkered flags as everybody else. Dystany Spurlock’s name might be pronounced like “Destiny,” but this run is not happening by accident — she earned her way here.
RELATED: Michael Jordan’s NASCAR Journey: Inside The Rise Of 23XI Racing
See social media’s reaction to her groundbreaking racing below:
Who is Dystany Spurlock? The Black Woman Breaking Barriers In NASCAR was originally published on cassiuslife.com
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Adriana Varejão, Parede com incisões à la Fontana (Istambul) [Wall with Incisions à la Fontana (Istanbul)], 2011
© Adriana Varejão. Foto [Photo]: Vicente de Mello
Brazil Pavilion
Comigo ninguém pode, Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão
Giardini
Two superstars of Brazilian art—Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão— participate in a joint show in the Brazilian pavilion. “The exhibition brings together historical works from more than three decades of production by the two artists, in which both address colonial wounds and traumas,” says a project statement. “What is interesting is that these two artists are around the same age but have never collaborated,” Giovanna Querido, the curatorial assistant of the pavilion, tells The Art Newspaper.
The plant popularly known as comigo-ninguém-pode, a majestic but highly toxic flora, is the focus of the exhibition, which includes Aracnes (1999-2026) by Paulino, a concrete wall covered with printed photographs of slave women alongside Varejão’s Still Life amid Ruin (2026), a series of reliefs and murals jutting out from the walls of the pavilion. Atlantic Vermelho (2026), a digital print by Paulino, depicts and mimics the shape and forms of Varejão’s wall reliefs, reflecting the synergy between the two women artists.
Bosnian pavilion
Domus Diasporica, Mladen Bundalo
Palazzo Malipiero
Every Time You Leave, You Are Born Again, 2026, photography, 30 x 21 cm, © Mladen Bundalo. Courtesy the Artist
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national pavilion at the Venice Biennale invites visitors to do the unusual at an art presentation: touch. In Domus Diasporica, the artist Mladen Bundalo examines themes of diaspora, migration and identity, tracing how notions of home are reshaped by personal, social and political forces. It’s an idea with a strong cultural context: the Bosnian War of the early 1990s displaced more than half the country’s population. Installed in the Palazzo Malipiero, the Biennale presentation encourages visitors to sit at a modest arrangement of tables and chairs and leaf through four photo books documenting the living rooms of Bosnian émigrés, some of whom relocated as far afield as Hawaii and Thailand. Visitors can also hold and explore Bundalo’s interpretation of imagined refugee passports. In adjoining rooms, home videos and archival footage unfold alongside drawings, photographs and installations of moving boxes and letters addressed to absent loved ones. The result is an understated but immersive display, grounded in a meaningful tactile experience.
Japan pavilion
Grass Babies, Moon Babies, Ei Arakawa-Nash
Giardini
Installation of Japan Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2026
Photo: Uli Holz
One of the breakout crowd-pleasers at this year’s Venice Biennale is Ei Arakawa-Nash’s presentation for the Japanese pavilion, a work that balances Instagrammable whimsy with an unexpectedly sharp emotional charge. Grass Babies, Moon Babies invites visitors to pick up and carry one of 208 reflective sunglass-wearing infant dolls through the pavilion and surrounding garden.
Throughout the installation, the babies are shown scaling scaffolding, hanging suspended from ropes and gathering around televisions, while a changing station reveals QR-linked “diaper poems” tied to each doll’s assigned birthday.
The work’s emotional force lies in its physicality. Carrying the dolls through the exhibition gives literal weight to the pavilion’s engagement with themes such as war, care, declining birthrates and human rights. Arakawa-Nash became a parent to twins in 2024, and the exhibition draws on their experience as a queer parent and being part of the Japanese nikkei diaspora. Seeing even the most seasoned art-world figures instinctively and happily cradle the dolls made the exhibition one of the biennale’s most joyful presentations.
Austria pavilion
Seaworld Venice, Florentina Holzinger
Giardini
Seaworld Venice (2026)
Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
The one pavilion on everyone’s lips this year is the Austrian pavilion, which is making waves with its multitude of in-your-face nude participants immersed in and around pools of water, aquatic tanks and damp containers. The exhibition functions as an underwater theme park, sewage treatment plant and sacred building, imagining Venice as a flooded metropolis. “Seaworld Venice complicates the dualisms of purity and pollution, sin and expiation, making visible the waste that is kept out of sight yet remains constantly present,” says the wall text.
In the pavilion, visitors encounter a phalanx of nude women climbing up and down a vast metallic shaft, their bodies entwined around the ledges and handles. Nearby, a naked performer occasionally zooms around on a jet ski while harried pavilion attendants warn onlookers to back away from sewage splashing around a fabricated treatment facility (tip: use the on-site toilets at your discretion). The overall vision is of a dystopian universe drowning and sinking into oblivion.
Belgium pavilion
Miet Warlop, IT NEVER SSST
Giardini
Performers taking part in Miet Warlop’s IT NEVER SSST
© Reinout Hiel
A lot of people, in the moment we are living in, might feel like stomping their feet, shouting, crying, and hitting something with a stick. At the Belgium pavilion, that sense of release bursts through the doors, as long as you make sure to stop by during one of the regular performances. Dancers interact with a wide library of plaster slabs, each one imprinted with simple words, in different languages: hey, dai, sans, salut, etc. The artist Miet Warlop chose these words, in part, for their double meanings when spoken aloud: a nod to our fragile relationship to the truth. She explains that another core mission is to give participants a chance to express their real, raw feelings. “We think it’s important for [participants] to show some humanity, almost as a statement,” she says. It’s a statement that feels worth shouting about.
Canada pavilion
Entre chien et loup (Between dog and wolf)
Giardini
Installation view of Abbas Akhavan: Entre chien et loup
© Abbas Akhavan. Photo: Francesco Barasciutti
Canada’s pavilion this year stands out for its unassuming zen, and for the thoughtful way in which it touches on both a very particular moment in history and a much deeper time. The artist Abbas Akhavan has transformed the space into a greenhouse, steam misting the windows and a large, reflective pond taking up one corner. In that pond are giant Victoria waterlilies, named after the British monarch and exhibited at the Great Exhibition of1851 in London, but whose genus goes back some 200 million years. “What is the relationship to the future if your past is that deep?” Akhavan asks. “What does it mean to look at these plants at another world fair?” Amid the Biennale rush this is a poignant reminder, in the spirit of Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, to slow down and think.
Congolese pavilion
Simba Moto! Seize the Fire! Saisis le feu!, Sammy Baloji, Arlette Bashizi, Patrick Bongoy, Damso, Gosette Lubondo, Nelson Makengo, Aimé Mpané, Léonard Pongo, Géraldine Tobé
A work from Simba moto! Seize the fire! Saisis le feu!
Photo: Antoine Assumani. Courtesy the Pavilion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has mounted the country’s first national pavilion to successfully debut at the Venice Biennale, centring on fire and other elements as both destructive forces and agents of transformation. Installed in the former refectory of the Scuola Grande di San Marco—a 15th-century building now functioning as a hospital—the exhibition brings together a wide-ranging group work, from tapestries, paintings, photographs, glasswork, sculpture and video. The materiality of the exhibition reflects the diverse practices of young artists working in the Congo and across the country’s diaspora—with the exception of two, the group of artists representing the Congo are all under 40 years old. The pavilion’s trilingual title in Lingala, English and French, is a nod to the country’s layered history. The importance of fire in Congolese cosmology and the cultural importance of blacksmiths emerge as a strong theme, from Géraldine Tobe’s smoke paintings created with a kerosene lamp to Damso’s blown glass containing volcanic sand. For the artists, curator Nadia Yala Kisukidi says, fire has the capability for devastation but is also generative when harnessed.
Singapore Pavilion
A Pause, Amanda Heng
Arsenale
Installation view of A Pause (2025–26)
Image courtesy of Singapore Art Museum
Amidst the Venice frenzy, Amanda Heng offers A Pause at this year’s Singapore pavilion. The space has been transformed with a platform sloping down to the space’s picture window’s over the Arsenale, while showing the artist’s new two-channel video documenting how five Venice residents spend their leisure time. Curated by Selene Yap, the pavilion also shows large editions of her 1990 photos Parts of My Body (reprinted 2026), close-up nude self-portraits, a commemoration of time’s passing and its physical transformations.
Heng, now 75, is best known for her interactive performance projects that provoke considerations of gender and labour, and was an early advocate for both feminism and performance art in Singapore’s conservative 1990s. She founded Singapore’s first artist-run space The Artists’ Village in 1988 and Women in the Arts (WITA) in 1999.
Poland Pavilion
Liquid Tongues, Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski
Giardini
Installation view of Liquid Tongues
Photo: Jacopo Salvi (altomare)/ Zacheta Archive
Poland’s ambitious, transfixing, cross-disciplinary pavilion draws on whale song to ponder how we can better communicate—a subject that has never felt more relevant. Artists Bogna Burska and Daniel Kotowski worked with Choir in Motion (Chór w Ruchu), comprising both hearing and Deaf people, to create a series of underwater performances that convert whale sounds into spoken and signed musical compositions. The resulting films are a remarkable testament to collaboration: others involved in the project include the bioaucoustics researcher Ellen C. Garland and the composer Aleksandra Gryka.
It’s also a potently layered conceptual work: the underwater setting, for example, is a space in which sign language can be much more easily understood than spoken word, a hint towards the power and potential of less prevalent forms of communication. It’s also a poignant ode to whales and other non-human beings: many of the songs celebrating the culture, mythology and sense of community surrounding these wonderful creatures.
Saudi Arabia pavilion
May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones, Dana Awartani
Arsenale
An installation view of May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones in the Saudi pavilion © Alvise Busetto
The Saudi Palestinian artist Dana Awartani has recreated 23 floor mosaics that have been destroyed over the past 15 years in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, from sites including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the Apamea Synagogue in Hama and the Bureij mosaic in Gaza, which was only discovered in 2022.
Working with craftspeople, she remade the mosaics out of four different types of clay found in Saudi Arabia, choosing the material for its variations of colour. Unlike typical mud brick architecture, she did not add hay to the mud, which she dried in the hot Riyadh sun before arranging them—“like a puzzle”—for the pavilion in Venice. Without any binding agents the mosaics have already begun cracking, in a low note of the sites’ vulnerabilities.
Awartani first began work of this type when she re-created the mosaic of the Grand Mosque of Aleppo in 2022, which had been destroyed by Isis, and then later the floor of an ancient bathhouse in Gaza. But the exhibition here, curated by Antonia Carver with Hafsa Alkhudairi, represents a step up for the artist in its creation of an almost sepulchral atmosphere, with crunchy gravel underfoot evoking an archaeology site. The installation suggests both the continuity of creativity, in the connections between the mosaics despite some being thousands of years apart, and the relentlessness of destruction, particularly in the present moment. Just within the past week the Beiteddine Palace in Lebanon, which Awartani recreated after its 2024 damage, was hit again by another Israeli airstrike.
Korea pavilion
Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest, Goen Choi, Hyeree Ro, Han Kang, Yezoi Hwang, Huju Kim, Chrstian Nyampeta
Giardini
Installation view of Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest
Photo: Donghwan Kam
As protests pepper Venice, Korea’s long, rich culture of activism receives a thoughtful examination in Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest. Works by artists Goen Choi and Hyeree Ro hark back to Korea’s hopeful pocket of years following the Second World War and Japanese colonial rule, but before the 1948 partition sparked the Korean War and decades of American-backed military dictatorship.
Ro’s fragile wall work Bearing (2026), constructed from about 4,000 organza circles coated in wax and layered like scales or leaves, divides the space and invokes a womb or a sanctuary. Goen Choi’s metal rods of Meridian (2026) course through the space, including one that reaches out in symbolic conciliation to the adjacent Japan pavilion. The pavilion, whose other contributors include cultural luminaries including the Nobel literature prize winner Han Kang, also invokes the protests in South Korea that thwarted the 2024 coup attempt, positing that liberation and community are actions not objects.
French pavilion
Comme Saturne, Yto Barrada
Giardini
This thoughtful, layered presentation by the Moroccan-French artist Yto Barrada reflects on the construction of meaning and historical narratives. Using textiles and word play, Barrada nimbly allows technical terms for the weaving and sewing of fabric to transform into descriptions of emotion and metaphor, gliding seamlessly—or rather, with visible seams, in the many textile works on show—from material to evocation. In this her guide is the figure of Saturn, who is the god of agriculture and time—but who also devoured his own children. As she states in a characteristic pun: “Saturne se tourne”.
Comme Saturne is curated by Myriam Ben Salah and includes a celebration of the other women who have represented France at the Biennale before her, as well as the French literary traditions of OuLiPo and Surrealism.
Irish pavilion
Dreamshook, Isabel Nolan
Arsenale
Installation view of Isabel Nolan, Dreamshook
Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy of the artist and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
Isabel Nolan’s pavilion for Ireland, Dreamshook, looks to the Middle Ages—a time of social and religious upheaval that left its mark in the art and culture of the Renaissance. In a suite of tapestries and installation, Nolan reckons with the legacy of that high water mark in European culture, celebrating its achievements while also confronting the realities of class and privilege that it participated in.
She looks to Aldo Manuzio, a 15th-century Venetian who invented the paperback, thereby making literature vastly more widely available—a scenario she pictures in her tapestries of books flying on wings. The work also grounds itself in the architecture of the pavilion space, echoing its windows and arches in an installation that brings her critique of art and class to bear on the biennial itself.
Official. Unofficial. Belarus, Belarus Free Theatre
Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista (San Polo, 2351, Venice)
Installation view of Official. Unofficial. Belarus
Courtesy of Belarus Free Theatre. Photo: Dasha Trofimova.
Such is the potency of this collateral exhibition, completely unconnected to the Belarusian government, is that it hits you as soon as you walk through the door. A field of wheat, constructed by a group of recent political prisoners from the country—where freedom of expression is harshly repressed—rises up from a soil bed. Above it, straw spiders, a Belarusian symbol of home protection, have been cast out of metal prison bars. The scent of what the co-curator Daniella Kaliada describes as “a warm August afternoon at a small cemetery in a village with a freshly dug grave”, created by Ukrainian studio ol.factory, fills the air, while testimonies from the prisoners are read out by A-list celebrities including Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson.
If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is, and the rest of the pavilion is equally hard hitting. A number of works explore the issue of surveillance, including a 17th-century Dutch confession booth that, when you enter, runs a (randomised, for GDPR purposes) facial recognition process on you. It’s unsettling and, as Belarus’s first independent contribution to the Biennale, important.

The action, organised by the campaign group Art Not Genocide Alliance, will culminate in a rally in the city
In this week’s special Venice Biennale episode, Ben Luke reviews In Minor Keys along with Louisa Buck and Jane Morris, interviews artists Gabrielle Goliath and Lubaina Himid and meets writer Saidiya Hartman. Digital editor Alexander Morrison hears about a collateral event by Belarus Free Theatre, and Ben Luke learns about the restoration of two paintings by Tintoretto.

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October Gallery Museum
Connecting People with Art since 1985
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, in Washington, DC, sits next to the White House Photo: Abovfold via Wikimedia Commons
The US president Donald Trump’s plan to “beautify” the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) by painting its granite exterior white—which White House staff estimate will cost around $7.5m—hit a snag yesterday (7 May) when the project came before the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC). In a 1.5-hour session that included impassioned comments from preservationists and the public speaking out against the plan, as well as some probing questions from commission members, the panel approved a motion requesting further details about how paint will impact the historic building, how much continued maintenance would cost, and whether less intrusive and more affordable options to “brighten the building”, like exterior lighting, could be used instead.
Presenting the NCPC’s staff report on the proposal, the urban planner Michael Weil related the history of the EEOB, which underwent a major cleaning and modernisation effort between 2004 and 2012. While stating that agency staff supports the White House proposal to clean, repaint, reseal and restore the building’s façades, Weil said more information is needed to fully evaluate the painting proposal.
“First, we need to understand the project’s potential visual and physical impacts both to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and to the Lafayette Square National Historic Landmark District,” Weil said. He also acknowledged the extensive public interest in the project, including “over 2,000 written comments submitted through our agency website”—the vast majority of them negative.
Ryan Erb, the construction operations manager for the White House Office of Administration (WHOA), then answered questions from commission members, starting with Evan Cash, who also serves on the Council of the District of Columbia. Cash was concerned about not just the cost of painting the entire city-block-sized building white, but the ongoing work to keep it clean and stain-free. “We’re adding essentially a very new, big maintenance piece” to the building’s upkeep, Cash said.
Erb said the WHOA was still gathering information, but that a preliminary estimate for the paint job was $7.5m, and the office hoped it would last for around 25 years. That cost does not include any of the preliminary cleaning and preparation work needed, however, nor does it take into account any later repainting, Erb said. He added that more testing is required to see how the silicate paint actually performs on similar granite sourced from the same quarry in Vinalhaven, Maine, used to build the EEOB.
When it came time for public comments, several speakers presented heartfelt appeals to the NCPC to reject the painting proposal. These were led by Greg and Marion Werkheiser, the founders of Cultural Heritage Partners, who are suing the Trump administration in federal court to block the project. Perhaps the most engaging testimony was provided by Danilo Feliciano, who opened his comments with a Bible verse: “Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed. Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.” Feliciano chose the Psalm for its association with the ancient Hebrew King David, since Eisenhower’s first name at birth was David, not Dwight, as he was later called. “It’s literally a house of David,” Feliciano noted.
Pointing to the outpouring of public comments against the project, Feliciano added his own thoughts that “it just doesn’t seem like common sense to paint a building that’s only been cleaned twice in 150 years because it looks nice in a computer-generated picture. Sure, it might look nice for when the current president leaves office, but give it another ten years or so, and it probably won’t be.”
Feliciano ended with an effective comparison to the 1992 movie Death Becomes Her—in which two women, granted immortality, must spackle and spray-paint their undead but ravaged skin into eternity. “They’re still alive, but broken, a mockery of the beauty they once had,” Feliciano said. “It would be a shame to paint over such a historic structure with magic paint. It’s a temporary fix for a lasting legacy. Could you imagine the Statue of Liberty painted over?”
Because most of the commission’s members are tied to the Trump administration, many voiced their assurance that the project team would do its best to protect the EEOB. But several noted the need for more details as the proposal goes through future stages of review. And when the time came to vote, the commission nearly unanimously approved the NCPC staff report seeking further information, with only the mayoral appointee Arrington Dixon not responding during the roll call. Just moments before, he had briefly appeared on screen in a dentist chair, a bib tied around his chest. “Commissioner Dixon may be unable to speak right now,” NCPC chairman William Scharf noted dryly.
One group called the sudden demolition “a collective loss” while another expressed concern the $300m ballroom that will replace the East Wing “will overwhelm the White House itself”
The commission’s members also opted to forego a later vote on the final stage of the design despite public comments on the project being “overwhelmingly in opposition—over 99%”
The US president has set his sights on transforming the city of Washington, DC, to fit his grandiose aesthetic
A federal judge has rejected attempt by National Trust for Historic Preservation to temporarily halt president’s pet construction project
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The October Gallery Museum places art in the community. Here are partner locations where you can have an art experience.
Some locations art is installed inside buildings and visits are during regular business hours. Other locations are by appointment only. Schools are not open to the public. In addition, we have many outdoor installations that you can enjoy around the clock. Check each location below for details. Tours are available upon request. 215-352-3114.
Here are some of our patrons that have donated art and art related items installed as part of our Art in the Community program. Thanks!
Watson and Sonia Brown
Stephanie Daniel
Chad Cortez Everett
Gail Gaines
Dr. Darryl J. Ford
Kelly R. Harrison
Deborah Kelly
Betty Ann D. Lawrence
David Lawrence
Leon McDuffie
Michael Muhammad
Jay R. Ogilvie
Marjorie H. Ogilvie
Junious Rhone, Sr.
Robin Rhone
Shirley Rhone
April Rice
Karen Roach
Monica Rocha
Steve Satell
Deborah Stephens
Staci Watson 
Stephanie R. West
Horace Wright

Sign Up Now
Art and art related items may be returned to October Gallery in good condition within twenty (20) days of the purchase for store credit ONLY – unless otherwise stated on an invoice.
Items on layaway or even items paid for will be held by the gallery for no more than ninety (90) days from the original sale date. Refund is in store credit ONLY – unless other stated on an invoice.

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October Gallery Museum
Connecting People with Art since 1985
Tyreek Hill is back in court after being accused of fracturing a social media influencer’s leg during a football workout.
Most of the NFL courtroom attention this week has been on Stefon Diggs, who was found not guilty in an assault case involving his former personal chef. But he is not the only star wide receiver whose name is tied to a legal headline right now. Tyreek Hill, the former Miami Dolphins speedster and one of the most electric players of his era, is also in court — this time for a civil lawsuit by social media influencer and model Sophie Hall.
The case centers around an alleged incident from June 2023 at Tyreek Hill’s Southwest Ranches home in South Florida. According to Hall’s lawsuit, she met Hill after buying a ticket for her son to attend his football camp. From there, the two reportedly exchanged messages, and Hill allegedly arranged for Hall to travel to Florida and spend time at his home. What started as a visit eventually turned into a backyard football workout, and that is where Hall says everything went left.
Hall claims she participated in offensive line-style drills with Hill and his trainer, and the lawsuit alleges that things shifted after she allegedly pushed Hill backward during one of the plays. According to the complaint, people watching — including members of Hill’s family — laughed after the moment, and Hall’s side argues that Hill became embarrassed. The lawsuit alleges that on a later play, Hill charged into her “violently and with great force,” causing a fracture to her right leg.
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Hall’s side says the injury was serious. The complaint says she later needed surgery with metal hardware implanted, and Local 10 reported that she claims she still attends weekly physical therapy while dealing with pain and weakness. Hall is suing Hill for claims that include assault, battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligence. Depending on the cited filing, the damages have been described as up to $50,000 or in the $50,001-to-$75,000 range, but the larger point is that this is a civil case — meaning Hill is being sued for damages, not facing criminal charges in this trial.
Hill’s side has denied wrongdoing and is pushing back hard on Hall’s version of events. In court, Judge David Haimes summarized Hill’s defense, stating that Hill denies causing the injury and argues that Hall was negligent, voluntarily participated in the drills, and assumed the risks inherent in participating in football. Hill’s attorney has also previously argued that Hall’s injury happened because she tripped over a dog during the drills, not because Hill intentionally hurt her.
As of now, the case has officially moved into trial mode. Hill appeared in a Broward County courtroom on Wednesday, May 6, 2026, while jury selection began with nearly 100 potential jurors present. CBS Miami reported that a jury was selected, and NBC6 reported that opening statements were expected Thursday, with the trial estimated to last about two weeks. Hill, 32, was released by the Dolphins in February after four seasons in Miami and remains a free gent, so this courtroom battle is unfolding at a time when his football future is already under a microscope.
So, for anybody just catching up, the simple version is this: Sophie Hall says a friendly football lesson at Tyreek Hill’s home turned violent and left her with a fractured leg that required surgery. Hill says he did not cause her injury and that Hall accepted the risks of participating in the drills. Now, instead of this being just another off-field headline floating around social media, both sides are in front of a Broward County jury, and the next couple of weeks should determine how much weight Hall’s claims — and Hill’s defense — actually carry in court.
RELATED: Stefon Diggs Found Not Guilty Of Assaulting Former Chef, Social Media On Fire
See social media’s reaction to Hill’s trial below.
Tyreek Hill Trial: What We Know So Far About Lawsuit Over Allegedly Breaking Influencer’s Leg was originally published on cassiuslife.com
COMMENTARY: 5 Reasons Why Obama Will Beat Romney
The 30 Most Beautiful Black Women In Hollywood
Rest In Power: Notable Black Folks Who We’ve Lost In 2026
The 30 Hottest Black Men In Hollywood
We care about your data. See our privacy policy.
An Urban One Brand
Copyright © 2026 Interactive One, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
source

The October Gallery Museum places art in the community. Here are partner locations where you can have an art experience.
Some locations art is installed inside buildings and visits are during regular business hours. Other locations are by appointment only. Schools are not open to the public. In addition, we have many outdoor installations that you can enjoy around the clock. Check each location below for details. Tours are available upon request. 215-352-3114.
Here are some of our patrons that have donated art and art related items installed as part of our Art in the Community program. Thanks!
Watson and Sonia Brown
Stephanie Daniel
Chad Cortez Everett
Gail Gaines
Dr. Darryl J. Ford
Kelly R. Harrison
Deborah Kelly
Betty Ann D. Lawrence
David Lawrence
Leon McDuffie
Michael Muhammad
Jay R. Ogilvie
Marjorie H. Ogilvie
Junious Rhone, Sr.
Robin Rhone
Shirley Rhone
April Rice
Karen Roach
Monica Rocha
Steve Satell
Deborah Stephens
Staci Watson 
Stephanie R. West
Horace Wright

Sign Up Now
Art and art related items may be returned to October Gallery in good condition within twenty (20) days of the purchase for store credit ONLY – unless otherwise stated on an invoice.
Items on layaway or even items paid for will be held by the gallery for no more than ninety (90) days from the original sale date. Refund is in store credit ONLY – unless other stated on an invoice.

source

“I think they’re different chapters of your beginning,” Frazier said, describing the three concepts of her handbags.
Joy Frazier spent years in boardrooms as a financial director, where she was often the only Black woman at the table, learning quickly that perception can shift the moment she speaks. Over time, she became more interested in what could speak for her before she ever said a word.
“If you have a different opinion, then you have to be this angry black woman,” Frazier told theGrio. “But I feel with the bags, it’s like you step in the room and you speak volumes without saying anything.”
That idea, that a woman should be seen fully and on her own terms before she ever opens her mouth, inspired Frazier to launch Keis to Joi, her luxury handbag line.
The brand debuted with three silhouettes and 27 colorways, blending Frazier’s personal experiences with her entrepreneurial vision. The bags were crafted in collaboration with Jean Rousseau Paris, and its creative vision with lead designer Alejandro Guillen. Frazier shared how Keis of Joi stands out among other designer brands.
“I didn’t want it to just be like anything you can get out there,” she said. “I want it to be something that people carry and when someone sees them and says, I identify with that. I know that story. I feel that.”
To understand that story, though, you have to go back to the beginning and to the three cities that shaped her.
Frazier was born in London to a West Indian family. Her upbringing was structured and practical, with young people encouraged to pursue stability and steady work. Entrepreneurship was not something often discussed.
“Growing up in London, you get a 9-5 education,” she said. “That’s what you’re taught. I never thought of entrepreneurship until I came to America.”
Raised with Jamaican roots, Frazier grew up with a strong sense of community and the expectation that people show up for one another. After moving to New York in her 20s and 30s, her worldview shifted, and she realized she wanted to change her life.
Each city gave her something different. And that combination, she said, runs through everything she does, including a handbag line that nearly never came to be.
Years ago, Frazier wanted to design shoes. She could never find styles eclectic enough to match her taste, so she set out to make her own. She found a manufacturer and began the process before life, as it often does, pulled her elsewhere. The dream went quiet.
She revived that dream at a New York fashion event in November 2024, when she met a young designer who worked on bag hardware at Macy’s. Rather than wait until she could tackle shoes, she made a practical decision.
“Maybe I can start off with accessories before I get to the shoes,” Frazier recalled. “Let me start off small.”
She followed up. A year and a half later, she had a full collection, one that surprised even her.
“I didn’t know it was going to turn out like that,” she said.
The name Keis to Joi is a play on her first name and also a philosophy. The keyhole, a central motif in the hardware, is meant to represent the act of stepping into yourself, with courage, wisdom and the love that sustains you through the journey.
Each of the three bags in the collection represents a different chapter of that journey, Frazier said, from work to play, from ambition to wisdom to love.
“I think they’re different chapters of your beginning,” she said. “You start as a visionary — you’ve got to be a visionary of thinking ahead to take that bold step. Then you have to have the wisdom to move forward. Then that comes with your heart and your love and your lineage on the way.”
She compared the idea to the classic film “The Wizard of Oz” and how Dorothy encountered several characters along her journey. She meets the Lion searching for courage, the Tin Man searching for heart and the Scarecrow searching for wisdom, which, Frazier noted, are not strangers. They are us.
“I believe my bag line is not something that we just carry. Luxury is what we just carry. It’s luxury — what’s inside of us. We carry it all along; the selfless self-discovery, [the] courage, being bold. And I think we all do that, but sometimes we don’t realize, as we walk, that we know it’s inside us.”
That philosophy extends beyond the handbag; it encompasses the nonprofit work she has been engaged in for over a decade, work that, much like her entire story, began with her mother.
A post shared by Joy A M Frazier (@_thebrit)
Mehala Isadora Miller was a nurse in London. After retiring, she began opening her home to single mothers and their children. She took people in, helped families get steady and watched them grow. Frazier grew up in that house, surrounded by people her mother was quietly changing.
“My mom was a nurse, but when she retired, she helped other single moms,” Frazier said. “Seeing that from my eyes, you see how those families excel and blossom. That made me think, wow, I’d love to do something like that and pave that forward.”
Miller has since died. In 2015, Frazier founded the MIM Foundation, named after her mother, to keep her spirit alive. The nonprofit offers life skills programming, health resources and a weekly baby pantry with diapers and supplies for mothers in need.
The mothers who come, she said, have become family. Many eventually come back as volunteers, giving to other mothers what was once given to them. And, in turn, Frazier said she did not see coming that they started showing up for her, too.
“They check on me,” she said. “You possibly checking on you, but you checking on me and seeing if I’m okay. And that’s what I love.”
What she has built, Frazier recalled, is not a service. It is a circle, which is the same thing she is trying to build with the bag line.
“I’m not about followers,” she said. “I’m about community.”
With Mother’s Day approaching, Frazier has a message for any mother who has been sitting on a dream, waiting for the right moment or the right permission.
Stop waiting, she said. Name the fear. Find the block. Figure out how to get around it.
“The big F-E-A-R kicks in,” she said. “We don’t feel we can, or we’re told we can’t do it.”
She continued, “You can’t want it more for the mother if they don’t want it for themselves.”
But for the mothers who do want it?
“Dream big,” she said. “The sky’s the limit. Just tell me what your block is. How can we get you to that space?”
Frazier, a financial director, nonprofit founder, luxury bag designer, daughter, and community mother, has been finding her way throughout her journey, which she continues to build with Keis to Joi.

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Treat your mom to an extra-special day with these must-have Mother’s Day freebie and savings opportunities
Mother’s Day is upon us and it’s that time of year that we show love to our wives, mothers, sisters, aunties, grandmothers, godmothers, and any mother figure in our life.
But sometimes that can be difficult when the budget is tight or the bills are due. But it’s not about the amount of money you spend on that lovely lady in your life, it’s really about doing something that will make them feel speicial and howing them love. So we scoured the internet to find the best freebies and Mother’s Day deals for 2026 so you can not only show you care but watch your budget.
RELATED STORY: She Get It From Her Mama: 5 Powerhouse Celebrity Mothers And Daughters
RELATED STORY: https://blackamericaweb.com/playlist/black-tv-moms/
Raising Cane’s is running Mother’s Day special for it’s Caniac members on May 10th and 11th. Buy one get one free box cmbo. What’s the catch you must sign up to be a Caniac Member and verfiy your account before May 9th to get in the deal! Click here for details
TCBY is offering a free 6oz frozen yogurt on May 10th valid on Mother’s Day only at participating locations.
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Ace Hardware is giving away its viral mini buckets to the first 48 customers on May 8-10th. This is only for participating locations, so call your local store for details
You may not think Walgreens is the Mother’s Day plug but they are offering shoppers a free 8X10 photo when you use the code MVPMOM.
Ulta Beauty is offering a free Mother’s Day tote bag with every $70 fragrance purchase.
Lowe’s is giving out a free flower to the first 150 MyLowe’s Members on May 9th. Click here to sign up for MyLowe’s
For all the furbaby moms, Petco is offering a free photo with their pet from 2-4pm on May 9th at participating locations
Williams Sonoma is offering free Italian cooking class where you can learn to make Lemon Caper Pasta at 11am on May 10th in stores. This is a first come first serve basis and space may be limited.
White Castle is offering BOGO combo meals for Craver Nation May 9-11th. To join Craver Nation tap here

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“This book is a roadmap to the future,” Rhonda Joy McLean said. “We really try to anticipate changes in the workplace.
Six hundred thousand Black women have been laid off, fired or pushed out of the workforce since early 2025, and the number is still climbing. DEI initiatives that took decades to build have been gutted through executive orders. In the midst of it all, three veteran executives decided it was the right moment to update a leadership book written specifically for Black women, one beloved enough to earn a second edition.
Elaine Meryl Brown, a Daytime Emmy Award-winning writer and executive producer, and Rhonda Joy McLean, president and CEO of RJMLEADS LLC, aren’t newcomers to this fight. The co-authors of the newly republished “The Next Little Black Book of Success,” part of a leadership series they built alongside the late Marsha Haygood, who passed away earlier this year, have spent decades navigating spaces that were never built for them, and buried the people they loved most while still showing up to lead.
The book, originally published in 2010 and selling more than 60,000 copies, has been updated for this specific moment: mass layoffs, AI reshaping entire industries and a political climate openly hostile to Black women in professional spaces.
“This book is a roadmap to the future,” McLean said. “We really try to anticipate changes in the workplace — we talk about AI. We talk about trying to be an authentic black woman in the workplace.”
At the center of that roadmap is an argument the authors have been making for nearly two decades: the skills that actually determine whether you survive and advance in the workplace are rarely the ones anyone teaches you. And according to Brown, those skills don’t belong to any one generation — they apply to every Black woman, wherever she is in her career.
The “Little Black Book” career guide has always focused on soft skills — the ones that rarely show up in job descriptions but determine almost everything about whether you stay, advance or burn out.
“It’s the hard skills that really get us in the door, but it’s the soft skills that really sustain us,” Brown said. “And our mantra for this book — the first person you lead is yourself.”
Those skills, they argue, look different depending on who’s in the room,and today’s workplace has more generations in it than ever.
“Our book also addresses how each generation may work differently or approach problems. You know, millennials are different than the Gen Xers, and different than the Gen Yers, and different than the boomers. And we all have to figure out how to listen to each other and how to work together,” Brown added.
Learning to work across those differences requires something deeper than surface-level professionalism; it requires knowing the difference between being liked and being respected. For McLean, that lesson began long before she ever set foot in a boardroom.
In August 1965, a 13-year-old McLean integrated a previously all-white high school in North Carolina with a sheriff’s gun at her back and two other Black girls beside her. They were met with hostile signs, and the principal was unkind to them, but McLean and the two other girls, whom she says she is still friends with 50 years later, said community is what got them through.
“We learned to stand alone because they separated us. We could not sit together. Only at lunch could we sit together. And we also learned that sometimes you just have to stand on your own in the face of ignorance and fear,” McLean said.
Decades later, McLean, an attorney, found herself in a different kind of hostile room: New York law firms in the 1980s. The assumptions about who she was and what she was there to do followed her through every door. As one of the few Black women in those spaces, she was often mistaken for support staff rather than counsel. She learned quickly that waiting for others to define her role was not an option.
“If food came in, they would look at me, for me to go and get it and serve it. And being from the South, there was a part of me that, you know, just being nice, but I learned to keep my butt in that chair, let those men get their little heinies up and serve themselves. And I learned, but it was hard and it was painful and not nice,” McLean recalled.
It’s the same situations she addresses in one of the book’s most talked-about chapters, “Don’t Be the Office Mammy,” which draws on her own experiences while speaking to other Black women whose innate response is to take care of everyone else’s needs while putting themselves last. However, the workplace often demands something very different.
“It’s just in you to just take it over, take care of it, and not promote yourself, not take credit, not even put your name on it. Well, in corporate America, you can’t do that. You’ll disappear.” McLean said, noting that a woman can also do things outside of her primary job description, but “don’t let that be all you’re known for.”
The book doesn’t let readers stay in the professional without acknowledging the personal. No section makes that clearer than the chapter on leading after loss, which McLean wrote while dealing with her own grief after losing her stepdaughter to cancer and, three months later, her husband. Then came the loss that reshaped the book itself.
During that time, McLean said she relied on her friends and family, as well as Brown and Haygood, to help her through it. “I stopped writing. I couldn’t write at all for months, and they just held me up. So they wrote some of the things I was supposed to write.”
The two authors ultimately returned the favor when their beloved friend and co-author faced her own battles. “When Marsha became ill, because she was sick for a year before she passed, we held her up, and Elaine and I split up the chapter she was working on. So what we learned is, once again, going all the way back, start with your fundamental relationships, friends, family, faith. We’re all believers and in different ways,” McLean said.
Haygood passed away in January after a yearlong illness. Her chapters remain in the book, and according to both McLean and Brown, her voice is on every page.
“Marsha is still with us. We’re continuing her legacy. I still feel Marsha’s presence whenever we have conversations about the book,” Brown said.
The chapter also expands the definition of grief beyond the personal, which the authors speak about women who may be mourning professional losses.
“There are all kinds of loss. Big loss is like a loss of a job, a loss of a position. Maybe a lot of us are also being demoted. So it’s not like you lose your [actual] job, but you lose some of the things that really made you feel special, that really hurts, and that’s a loss that you need to grieve,” McLean said.
Which brings it back to where so many Black women find themselves today: displaced by DEI rollbacks and trying to figure out what comes next. For both authors, the answer starts with something simpler than a strategy: establishing relationships before the crisis hit.
“I would call it relationship building,” McLean said. “You need to not have waited until you were laid off to have a network of people who can help you. You need to know people from your high school, from college, your church, your sorority, your Girl Scout troop.”
Brown also adds a note about expanding that circle beyond familiar groups. “At one point I had all black women and maybe one black man in my network. I realized I don’t have any white people, no Asian, or different religions. Just kind of expand your group of people.”
Despite the challenges along the way, McLean returns to what she has always believed about Black women. “Black women are the most creative people I know. We can take something and turn it into enough for everyone. We’re like Jesus and the five loaves and two fish. And they said 5,000 people. We do that all the time. And I don’t think we even see that as a skill.”
The conversation feels especially timely as McLean and Brown brought their decades of experience from the pages to an in-person discussion. On April 27, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated® – Rho Gamma Omega Chapter, serving the Oranges and Maplewood community in New Jersey, hosted a conversation with the two authors alongside TheGrio’s Natasha S. Alford serving as moderator.
The event was organized by the chapter’s Advocate for Social Justice Committee, which focuses on equipping communities with tools, knowledge and support to activate their voices and foster self-empowerment. It brought both McLean and Brown together at a time when conversations around leadership and advancement feel especially urgent.
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A seagull nests at the Polish Pavilion
The Art Newspaper
Curators, critics and collectors zoomed from pavilion to pavilion during the VIP preview of the Biennale. The world seemed to slow down, however, when the VIP visitors passed by the Polish pavilion in the Giardini—thanks to a bird that has given birth. Staff at the pavilion have kindly built a protective barrier around a seagull that has laid three eggs near the entrance, warning visitors not to approach the feisty beast who brandishes a very sharp beak. “This, for me, is the main attraction,” said an Italian collector standing in awe over the majestic gull. The happy but snappy bird has, it appears, not yet brought her chicks into the (art) world—watch this space.
A chocolate gladiator features in Valletta-based artist Charlie Cauchi’s film and accompanying installation in the Arsenale
Derrick Adams’ piece features “beams of gold signifying the brilliance and reach” of the curator’s influence
Having just taken on the Met Gala as a “living sculpture”, the multi-disciplinary artist came to Venice later in the week for a compelling performance
The artist’s contribution to In Minor Keys includes a decked out truck driven from London to Venice

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